Eastward of Sumer the type of language was thus agglutinative, as it was in Sumer itself. And in the days when civilization first grew up there, there is no sign or trace of the languages we call inflectional. The speakers of Aryan dialects, whom we find in classical times in Media or Persia or North-Western India, belong to a later epoch; the old belief in the Asiatic cradle of the Aryan tongues has long since been given up by the anthropologist and comparative philologist,[67] and it is recognized that if we are to look for it anywhere it must be in Eastern Europe. The Semitic languages are equally absent; the tide of Semitic speech which eventually overflowed Babylonia, surged northward and eastward into Assyria and Elam, but never succeeded in passing Susiana, and was finally driven again from the ground it had once gained there. The home of the Semite lay to the west and not to the east of the Babylonian plain. Babylonian culture owed its origin to a race whose type of language was that of the Finn, of the Magyar or the Japanese. The physical characteristics of this race cannot as yet be fully determined. The oldest sculptures yielded by Babylonian excavation belong to a time when the Semite was already in the land. It might be supposed that the early monuments of Tello, which were erected by Sumerian princes and go back to Sumerian times, would give us the necessary materials; but not only are they too rude and infantile to be of scientific use, they also indicate the existence of two ethnological types, one heavily bearded, the other beardless, with oblique eyes and negrito-like face. It is not until we come to the age of Semitic domination that sculpture is sufficiently realistic for exact anthropological purposes. At the same time, there was to the last a marked contrast of both form and feature in the artistic representation of the Babylonian and his more purely Semitic Assyrian neighbour. The squat, thick figure, the full, well-shaven cheeks, the large, almond-shaped eyes and round head of King Merodach-nadin-akhi in the twelfth century B.C. still reproduce the characteristic form and features of the statues found in the palace of Gudea, the Sumerian high-priest of Lagas, who lived more than a thousand years before. The aquiline or hooked nose, the thick lips and muscular limbs which distinguished the Assyrian are generally wanting in Babylonia. And, on the other hand, there is a likeness between the Babylonian as he is portrayed on the monuments and the Elamite adversaries of Assur-bani-pal, some of whom, it is noticeable, are depicted with beards, though the excavations of Dieulafoy and de Morgan at Susa have shown (according to Quatrefages and Hamy) that a beardless and short-nosed negrito type with round heads was aboriginal in Elam. The same type is reproduced in one of the heads found at Tello, and M. de Morgan has pointed out that similar brachycephalic and beardless